Burma: Struggle for Democracy

Contested Ground: The Struggle for Democracy in
Burma
by Alan Senauke
[This article appeared originally in the Spring
1994 issue of Breakthrough, a political journal
published by Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. To
respond to the article, to order a copy of the
publication, or to subscribe, please send mail to
pfoc@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
I remember best the faces of children. a fourteen-
year-old Burmese Shan girl sold over the border to
a Thai brothel in the Golden Triangle. Karenni kids
with tattered clothes and bellies starting to swell
from malnutrition at a camp for displaced Burmese
ethnics a few dusty miles inside Thailand. A
twelve-year-old Karen army boy with a handmade
cigarette and an automatic weapon slung on his
shoulder, playing at war games that are not games.
A feverish baby with an IV taped to her arm, sick
with malaria and intestinal disease. Eleven-year-
old girls jumping rope at the Daughter's Education
Project in Mae Sai, for the moment safe from the
flesh trade and from AIDS. These are only a handful
of memories.
I don't really know the faces of the junta, the
State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC,
as it's familiarly known. Rangoon and fabled
Mandalay are just glossy pictures. Chances are I
won't see them until democracy is established. But
I see SLORC's victims in my dreams: tribal people
driven in flames from their villages, old men and
women conscripted for deadly work carrying supplies
over the mountains, revolutionary students, monks
in the jungle, intellectuals and activists far from
family and home in the cities. How is it these
people can still offer a smile in the midst of
great suffering, and share their small rations with
a strange guest or an old friend?
In the winter of 1991 and again in 1992, I traveled
on two week-long witness delegations to the
Thai/Burma border, a journey organized by the
International Network of Engaged Buddhists at the
invitation of resistance organizations on both
sides of the border. My own experience of Burma as
guest of rebel students, monks, and ethnic peoples
didn't take me very far into the country. But what
we saw of courage, despair, resistance, disease,
and poverty left me with images and concerns
forever etched in my mind.
Our 1991 journey to Manerplaw, the rough-hewn
ethnic Karen military town that headquarters the
Karen Army, the national government in exile, and
the All Burma Student Democratic Front, came at a
dramatic hour. With the rainy months quickly
approaching, SLORC's generals had vowed to capture
and destroy the town during the current winter
offensive. But we didn't know that at the time.
>From Mae Son Lap on the Thai side, we traveled down
the Salween and Moie Rivers in long flat-bottomed
boats propelled noisily by small truck diesels. The
forests and hills around us were thick and green,
scraped bare in places for now-empty Karen
settlements. Our papers were scrutinized at rebel
checkpoints along the river, where young soldiers
warily eyed our strange contingent of monks, Thais,
and Westerners.
In Manerplaw we were treated graciously, given what
bare, clean floors were available for sleeping. Our
meetings with various factions, leaders, officers,
and functionaries were friendly but often distant
and full of speechifying. In the damp heat we
consumed many gallons of tea, bottled water, and,
incongruously, cans of Pepsi and other soft drinks
hauled across and down the river from Thailand.
The backdrop for these discussions was a fierce,
ongoing battle for Sleeping Dog Mountain, strategic
heights that overlooked Manerplaw and the Thai
Border. As we talked, there was the sound of not-
so-distant mortar fire. We would stop a moment,
take a deep breath and then go on. The men we met
with spoke confidently of victory, but they looked
drawn and weary. In a day or two, we would return
to the comforts of Thailand. Most of them would be
back at the front.
The day that we left to visit refugee camps across
the river, the Burmese launched their first air
strikes on Manerplaw, swinging their Yugoslav jets
eastward over Thai airspace to bomb the town from
the rear. Thankfully there were few casualties, but
several of the buildings we met in were destroyed,
while people sheltered in shallow dirt bunkers.
This was the start of a bitter assault on Manerplaw
that just barely failed, persisting for the
following six weeks, claiming several hundred lives
on both sides. Two years later this is still
contested ground.
My journey in 1992 was less dramatic, but somehow
more disturbing. By train and van we came north
from Bangkok and Chiang Mai towards the Golden
Triangle, where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet, and
China looms just a few miles away. In the raw
border town of Mai Sai anything can be bought and
sold: opium, Buddhist treasures, gems, Chinese
household goods, young women. The crowded streets
and markets closed up with the coming of evening,
and a feeling of menace rose with the moon, the
only place in all my Thailand travels that my
street sense said to watch my step.
A little to the south and west, not actually so far
in miles, large settlements of displaced tribal
people lived in conditions I had never witnessed
before: a village of 1,500 without running water--
it had to be carried a mile from the spring; a
handful of medicine, some quinine and antibiotics,
a few rolls of bandage. How could this meet the
needs of desperate people? With the annual rains
again approaching, many of the thatched palm and
bamboo shacks didn't even have a roof. We stood in
the dust with our own grim faces and tears. The
small stores of rice, beans, oil, and fish paste we
had brought as an offering would not go very far.
Would it even be enough to feed all the children?r
A History of Tyranny
Under the tyranny of General Ne Win, along with Ne
Win's xenophobic Burmese Socialist Program Party,
and the current regime of brutal generals, Burma's
great human and natural resources have been
squandered in civil war, spent for weapons of
destruction. In recent years Burma has achieved
dubious status as a UN-designated "least developed
country," where many of the 40 million Burmese
people earn less than $200 per year. In a nation
that was formerly known as "Asia's rice bowl," even
rice with a bit of fish paste is often a luxury. In
fact one can't even find Burma on a map today.
SLORC has renamed their country the Union of
Myanmar. The ancient capital Rangoon is now Yangon,
and many other names have been changed, daily
reminders of SLORC's self-appointed power over many
millions of desperate citizens.
Under this same corrupt leadership, Burma's most
famous daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the
1991 Nobel Peace Prize, lives under close house
arrest and constant surveillance, silenced by an
illegal government that fears her message of peace
and democracy may be heard and taken up in a
country that has long lacked both. Thousands fill
unmarked graves. Many more fill the jails without
benefit of trial. Along the borders with Thailand,
China, and Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of
displaced people find a precarious existence,
almost invisible to the outside world.
The roots of Burma's suffering are deep and
tangled. A patchwork region of highly independent
ethnic minorities-- Burman, Shan, Karen, Mon,
Arakanese--were annexed as a province of India
after the last Anglo-Burman War in 1886. The
customary British colonial strategy of divide-and-
rule took advantage of existing differences and
tensions. Indian civil servants were brought in to
run civil affairs, so a native middle class
familiar with Western administration and technology
never developed. The timber-rich ethnic nationality
areas, circling the more densely populated central
region, were administered separately as restricted
areas, driving a wedge even deeper between these
peoples and the majority of Burmans. This remained
the status quo until 1937 and the prelude to World
War II.
The war took a terrible toll on Burma, where a
scorched-earth policy by retreating British and
Japanese forces devastated indigenous agriculture.
Initially a core of young Burman intellectuals
sided with the Japanese, who courted them with an
anti-British, anti-colonial line. A generation of
Burma's future leaders, Aung San (Aung San Suu
Kyi's father), U Nu, and Ne Win took secret
military training in Japan, then marched back to
their country behind Japan's army of occupation.
(Japanese occupation was bitterly opposed by many
of the ethnic groups, whose loyalty had been bought
by the British with assurances of future autonomy.)
But these young leaders soon found that Japanese
domination was even crueler than the British, and
began to form the first delicate alliances with
both pro-Western ethnic peoples and pro-Communist
rebels.
After the war British promises of autonomy were not
kept. While Ne Win was consolidating a national
army from the anti-Japanese resistance, Aung San
was simultaneously negotiating with the British,
and with the Karen and other ethnic groups. It was
a masterful balancing act, moving towards
independence and representative democracy. But this
hope was wiped out when right-wing assassins
machine-gunned Aung San and six other ministers in
July of 1947. His friend U Nu tried to fulfill Aung
San's mission, declaring an independent Burma on
January 4, 1948. But neither the ethnic minorities
nor the pro-Communist forces who had spearheaded
the war against Japan had been offered a place in
this government. Within a year they had taken up
arms against the new government.
The civil war begun then continues to this day.
With rebels closing in on the cities, the army,
under Ne Win, took control from 1958 to 1960, and
again in 1962. Pursuing his own "Burmese Way to
Socialism," he expelled the Indian and Chinese
administrators and managers, replacing them with
inexperienced Burman military officers, and closed
the door on all Western contact and investment. In
1974 as the insurgency was growing, Ne Win
attempted to legitimize himself, imposing a new
constitution, sanctioning one-party rule, and
eliminating even the most fundamental human rights.
In 1987 Ne Win astonishingly declared the three
highest-denomination kyat bank notes worthless and
issued 45 and 90 kyat bills, based on his
fascination with the number nine. The de-
monetization wiped out many people's savings, and
Ne Win's looting of the economy funded a military
that consumed more than 50 percent of the GNP. In
1988, students, monks, and intellectuals spoke out
forcefully, calling for an end to war and for a
federal democracy recognizing minority rights. All
through the spring, demonstrations and the army's
violent response intensified; the death toll ran
into hundreds. Universities and high schools were
shut down--many are still closed. And for the
following year even primary and elementary schools
were closed. As the nation ground to a halt, Ne Win
made a show of retirement, leading to even greater
chaos and repression. His appointed successor,
General Sein Lwin, was, if anything, even more
hated and feared than Ne Win, having led bloody
repressions of urban dissent in 1964, 1974, and in
earlier months of 1988.
Two weeks later on August 8, protest reached a peak
and was met by a paroxysm of state violence that
left more than 1,000 dead--without managing to
silence the call for democracy. The army was
withdrawn in confusion, Sein Lwin stepped down, and
an incredible flowering of free expression and hope
ensued. In these brief, promising days a new leader
emerged. Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been living with
her husband and children in England, was in Rangoon
visiting her dying mother. As daughter of Burma's
most revered post-war leader, she wears a mantle of
moral authority and fearlessness quite naturally,
giving peaceful voice to the people's yearning for
freedom.
A month later on September 18, 1988, realizing that
their 30-year grip on Burma was slipping away, the
generals declared martial law and established
SLORC. The killings began in earnest the next day.
Machine guns swept the streets from the tops of
buildings and overpasses. Demonstrators and
bystanders were murdered without warning, many
carried away to mass graves or mass cremations
where the cries of the wounded could be heard amid
the pile of corpses. No one knows precisely how
many died in these few days, but estimates run from
5,000 to 20,000. Many thousands more, particularly
students and young monks, fled to the border areas,
where they linked up with the ethnic Karen, Kachin,
and others who had long been involved in armed
struggle against the central government and Burman
hegemony.
As SLORC consolidated its power, the generals
realized that the nation had almost no cash
reserves either to feed or arm itself. After so
many years of isolation, they turned to Japan,
Thailand, the U.S., and UN agencies for loans and
development funds. To curry favor with the West the
junta promised timely elections. But SLORC's
numerous delays, rigidly controlled media, and
impossible campaign regulations failed to contain
the hunger for democracy. Ninety-three political
parties put up candidates for election in May of
1990. Of these, Aung San Suu Kyi's party, The
National League for Democracy (NLD), won 392 of 485
seats in a new government; ethnic minority parties
opposed to SLORC claimed victory in 65 other
contests. SLORC's National Unity Party won only ten
seats, two percent of the contested places.
But a new government was never formed. Within days
the military had arrested many elected
representatives from the NLD, carrying them off to
the notorious Insein jail. Some of them are still
imprisoned, some were executed on fabricated
charges of treason and insurrections. Others fled
to the border region, a second wave of exiles.
Burma's two most respected leaders, U Nu, who led
the only attempted democracy Burma has ever known,
and Aung San Suu Kyi, were placed under stringent
house arrest in Rangoon. Four years later, Suu
remains a prisoner, silenced in her own land,
revered around the world. SLORC recently extended
her sentence for a fifth year, piously asserting
that she is free to leave Burma any time she
wishes.
Over the last three years SLORC's policies have
carried repression from the cities far into the
interior, displacing several million people in
countless villages, driving them into exile or into
strategic hamlets reminiscent of the Vietnam War.
Some of these villagers are pressed into service as
porters for the army, used up like pack animals
until they drop from exhaustion. There are reports
that SLORC has marched villagers into known mine
fields to clear a path with their own blood. The
seasonal offensives on ethnic insurgents and
students have extracted a great price on all sides,
but pro-democracy allies have held on against all
odds.
International political and economic pressures in
1992 and 1993 again forced SLORC to offer a
pretense of motion towards democracy. With much
fanfare they announced preliminary meetings to form
a new constitutional convention. But few of those
elected in 1990 chose to collaborate, and the
proposed gathering was strongly denounced by the
provisional National Coalition Government of the
Union of Burma, headquartered in the Karen border
town of Manerplaw. In March of 1993, a delegation
of former Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including
the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Oscar Arias, added
their own principled protest against this sham of
democracy, demanding and failing to meet with
sister laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon. They
got no further than the insurgent border.
Geopolitics
Many analysts think that China is a key player in
Burma, as it has been in Cambodia, Tibet, and
elsewhere in Asia. With the Cold War coming to a
close, China is seizing the opportunity to become a
"great power." Its vast commercial and arms sales
to Burma (more than $3 billion) and growing
investments provide a crucial foothold in South and
Southeast Asia. This has a terribly destructive
effect on the Burmese people. Inexpensive and
relatively well-made Chinese consumer goods, like
rice cookers, cigarettes and crockery, have
displaced locally-made goods. Weapons have flowed
freely across the border from China's Yunnan
province for many years. In decades past, China
avidly supported the now-defunct Communist Party of
Burma (CPB), often using it as a buffer against
remnants of Kuomintang nationalist forces that
carved out fiefdoms on the border.
But even before the CPB's collapse in 1989, there
were clear signs that China's leaders saw their
strategic interests in other terms. General Ne Win,
long reviled as "Burma's Chiang Kai-shek," was
invited in May of 1985 for the first in a
continuing series of state visits to China, and
welcomed as an "old friend" by Deng Xiaoping. Today
many of SLORC's modern weapons--including tanks,
jet fighters, and rockets--are purchased with
profits from Burma's heroin trade via the Chinese
Polytechnologies Corporation, a corporation managed
by Deng Xiaoping's son-in-law. Looking beyond the
simple profit motive, as the Soviet Navy is
dismantled and U.S. forces are drawn elsewhere in
the world, China can at last implement its vision
of a blue-water navy. Burma has been courted as an
important ally, with deep water ports necessary for
China to extend military power across the Indian
Ocean.
Military goals not withstanding, other ASEAN
nations (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia,
the Philippines, and Brunei), along with Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, etc., are similarly involved in the
intense competition for new markets and new sources
of labor and resources in a region where economic
development is still surging ahead of much of the
world.
There Is Much to Do
Amnesty International is deeply committed to the
cause of human rights in Burma. The U.S.
government, including the president and Congress,
are on record against the abuses of SLORC, and have
instituted a ban on textile imports, which, while
symbolic, has almost no economic impact. More to
the point would be further conditioning or
revocation of China's Most Favored Nation trade
status for the scope of its arms sales to Burma and
throughout the region. U.S. corporations with
capital investment in Burma such as Amoco, Unocal
Petroleum, Pepsi Cola, Dean Hardwoods, and others
are targets of first opportunity for letterwriting
and consumer boycotts.
I would especially encourage you to support the
organizations below that work directly with the
Burmese insurgents and those at risk. In each case
these are people that we at the Buddhist Peace
Fellowship have met and continue to work with. We
are also happy to provide you with further
information, analyses, and to serve as a channel
for any funds you may have in support of the
Burmese.
Alan Senauke is National Coordinator of the
Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He is also an ordained
priest at the Berkeley Zen Center, where he lives
with his family.
Bibliography
Alan Clements, Burma: The Next Killing Fields?
(Emeryville, CA: Odonian Press, 1992)
Bertil Lintner, Land Of Jade (Edinburgh,
Scotland: Kiscadale Publications, 1990)
Bertil Lintner, Outrage: Burma's Struggle for
Democracy (Edinburgh, Scotland: Kiscadale
Publications, 1990)
Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin; CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn, NY:
Lawrence Hill Books, 1991)
Edith Mirante, Burmese Looking Glass: A Human
Rights Activist on the Forbidden Frontier (New
York: Grove Press, 1993)
Sulak Sivaraksa, Seeds of Peace (Berkeley, CA:
Parallax Press, 1992)
Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics
of Ethnicity (London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991)
Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear and Other
Writings (New York: Penguin, 1991)
Towards Democracy in Burma (Washington, DC:
Institute for Asian Democracy, 1992)
Resources
Buddhist Peace Fellowship, P.O. Box 4650, Berkeley
CA 94704, (510) 525-8596. Acts as a clearinghouse
in the U.S. for information and funds related to
Burmese freedom. Slide show is available.
Burmese Relief Centre, P.O. Box 48, Chiangmai Univ.
Chiang Mai 50002, Thailand. Small but deeply
respected organization providing food and medical
relief on both sides of the Thai/Burma border,
regardless of any factional alignments. In many
places they represent the only outside support.
Daughter's Education Project, P.O. Box 10, Mae Sai,
Chiang Rai 57310, Thailand. Provides an alternative
to prostitution for young girls, offering basic
education, vocational training, with an emphasis on
collective values and self-esteem.
All Burma Student Democratic Front (ABSDF), P.O.
Box 22, Mae Sot, 63110, Thailand. The main
organization of students in the border region. They
provide medical support and education to refugees
and serve as combatants with the alliance of ethnic
armed forces, the NDF.
Southeast Asian Information Network (SAIN), P.O.
Box 217, Chiangmai Univ, Chiang Mai 50002,
Thailand. An organization of non-violent activists
who train environmental documentation and
journalism. They have excellent contacts with all
groupings among the insurgents and are developing
first-rate documentary materials.